About the film

Latvia, the 1920s. Anna, a pretty and educated young woman, falls in love with an adventurous entrepreneur 30 years her senior. But with marriage comes jealousy, and the entrepreneur hides Anna away in the forest where she bears him eight children. Years later, Signe, a young artist, asks her father how her grandmother died.… This writer-director animated movie is a highly personal statement of the director’s struggle with an inherited illness. Set against the backdrop of her grandmother’s life, the first part touches on the difficult living conditions in Latvia during the Soviet and German occupations in order to focus on those members of the family suffering from the same affliction. Baumane is not only the director, illustrator, and screenwriter but also the film’s narrator, allowing her direct contact with the viewer. The filmmaker approached the gloomy and oppressive topic with detachment, hyperbole, and humor without diminishing either sincerity or urgency. Funny and bleak by turns, Baumane’s feature debut is the first animated film to compete in the main competition at Karlovy Vary.

About the director

Signe Baumane (b. 1964, Auce, USSR), whose work has been shown to acclaim at numerous international festivals, is an independent film animator known for her controversial shorts about sex, pregnancy, dentists, and madness. After studying philosophy at Moscow University (1989) she landed a job at Riga Animated Film Studio in 1991 where she eventually shot her first animated short, The Witch and the Cow.Tiny Shoes (1993) and The Gold of the Tigers (1995) followed. The director then left for New York where, in 1996-2003, she worked for Bill Plympton’s animation studio. Other shorts include: Love Story (1997), The Threatened One (1999), Natasha (2001), Five Fucking Fables (2002), Woman (2002), Dentist (2005), Veterinarian (2007), The Beat of Sex: Episodes 1-3 (2007), The Beat of Sex: Episodes 8-11 (2008), Birth (2009).